“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.”

“A people free to choose will always choose peace. ”

“Problems can only be avoided by exercising good judgment. Good judgment can only be gained by experiencing life’s problems.”

“You cannot succeed when surrounded by disloyal and unfriendly associates, no matter what may be the object of your definite chief aim. Success is built upon loyalty, faith, sincerity, co-operation and the other positive forces with which one must surcharge his environment.”

“Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”

“Take the broken pieces of your life, bake a master cake out of it. Don't stand still like a lake; keep flowing like a stream!

“Errors become mistakes when we perceive them and respond to them incorrectly. Mistakes become failures when we continually respond to them incorrectly.”

“Satan didn’t lose any of his beguiling ways when he became the fallen prince. He took his charm, his subtleties, and his clever plots to use on us.”

“And I like a mouse who has taken a cat for its tutor.”

“There’s one more serious risk for America that I want to mention here—the risk we have created by shouting down and shutting up any discussion of faith in the public square. It’s as if we’ve decided expressions or discussions of faith shouldn’t qualify as free speech. What’s even stranger is the way it has somehow been tied to the concept of separation of church and state, even though that concept has nothing to do with people living by or publicly discussing their faith.”

“When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.”

“It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.”

“Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.”